Page:George Archdall Reid 1896 The present evolution of man.djvu/202

190 variety of climates, under very diverse physical conditions, admirably illustrates my argument. It is manifest that the Mahomedan civilization is everywhere much the same. The Malay of the Eastern Archipelago is about as high in the scale of civilization, but no higher than the Moor of Fez, than the Turcoman raider on the Oxus, or the Arab slave-trader on the Congo. All these widely separated peojdes, of such diverse races, have much the same degree of prosperity and enlightenment, and practically they all think and act much alike. In other words, being in common under the influence of a dominant educational factor, their acquired knowledge, modes of thought, and motives for action, and the state of society resulting therefrom, are much the same. The Turk alone has received a thin veneer of the civilization of the Christians. Forced by the exigencies of his position, he has adopted the quickfiring rifles, the big guns, the ironclad ships, and the public debt of his Western neighbours; but everything that he has in excess of other Mahomedans is imported, purchased by the superior command of money, which the extent and populous condition of his territories bestows. At the bottom he remains the man that Mahomed made him, and, if the pressure of the Christian civilization were removed, would lapse back to what he was in the days of Osman. All the swarming millions of the Buddhists think and act much alike to one another, but differently from the peoples of other religions; their strange civilization is unlike all other civilizations, and their various communities have about an equal degree of prosperity. The same is true of the Hindoos, and of the adherents of all other religions.

We have here a law of civilization which has all the force of a law of nature, so uniform is its action; namely, that a civilization or a state of society invariably conforms to the religion with which it is